


Duumvirate

by goldleaf1066



Category: The Dark Crystal (1982), The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
Genre: Bathing, Falling In Love, Hair Braiding, Other, Puppets, Regret, Slice of Life, Slow Burn, The Conqueror - Freeform, The Heretic - Freeform, The Wanderer, Vignettes, descriptions of torture, descriptions of violence, past mistakes, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21707605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldleaf1066/pseuds/goldleaf1066
Summary: Past regrets and present uncertainties cause problems for skekGra as his relationship with urGoh unexpectedly deepens.
Relationships: skekGra & urGoh (Dark Crystal)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44





	Duumvirate

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't include the pauses in urGoh's speech because I figured it would drive everyone mad, so just read his parts s l o w l y.
> 
> The setting for this time-wise is sort of wishy-washy. I wouldn't pay too much attention to it :P
> 
> All lore errors are my own.

It starts with the flick of a brush, of gold paint onto a diadem in miniature. Then the sharpness of a pinprick, the jewel of blood on a fingertip that has been nowhere near a cutting edge but bleeds just the same. 

It began long before that, really, but it’s this moment skekGra returns to over in the time that follows: he, licking the blood from his finger, emerging from his garden to see what urGoh has been doing all day, hunched over and half-hidden at the rear of their home. Seeing paint and wood and spirals and hands and eyes and faces all so carefully and skilfully wrought lying in semi-formed circles on the floor. In the middle, one patient Mystic holding one hand aloft, the red trickle sliding down a forefinger matching that which sours skekGra’s tongue with the taste of metal. 

“Shouldn’t you see to that?” skekGra asks.

“In a moment,” urGoh says without looking up. “I’m almost finished.”

In two of his hands is a small figure, carved from wood. The fourth and last of urGoh’s hands is painting its headdress with steady precision. 

“What happened?” skekGra asks, distracted by urGoh’s and his bleeding fingers.

“The dual…” urGoh says, a pause between the words so long it’s as if he’s fishing for them in a deep pocket, “…glaive.”

SkekGra sees the blade, wrought in silver-painted wood and a perfect simulacrum of the real thing but many times smaller, on the floor by the urRu’s foot. The perfect size for a puppet, but a mere toothpick in the hands of skekGra.

“It’s a wooden blade,” skekGra says, approaching and stooping to pick it up. “How can you cut yourself on a wooden blade?”

UrGoh holds up the puppet, turning it in the light. Satisfied, he puts down the brush and swings his great head around to peer at skekGra with one eye. “Very carefully.”

It’s a gelfling in urGoh’s hand, skekGra notices, clothed in shimmering white, some leftover fabric from the urskek probably. UrGoh has made it into something quite special. “You finished it.”

“Yes.”

“It’s… very good.”

“Thank you.”

“Shall I…?” 

UrGoh follows skekGra’s gesture to his bleeding finger, still pointed skyward.

“See to your own, first,” he says, placing the gelfling down amongst the makings of several other puppets, half-formed, heads and legs only sometimes attached. 

SkekGra finds a strip of cloth with which to wrap his finger in the clutter of urGoh’s tools stacked more-or-less tidily near the wall as urGoh begins a slow shuffle out of the creative endeavours scattered around him. 

“Are you going to tidy that up?” skekGra asks, unable to help himself. He doesn’t want to stand on anything in the night, or to be woken unexpectedly by not-so-phantom pains jabbing into his foot when urGoh does.

“By the time,” urGoh says, moving behind and past him, ‘it’s tidied away, it will be time to get everything out again.”

SkekGra frowns, then realises urGoh is making a joke. Too late though, to laugh. UrGoh is at the foot of the ramp that leads to his favourite sitting place, where cushions and his hookah pipe await him. His injured hand is still held away from his body and upright as if casting an incantation. It’s stopped bleeding though, skekGra sees, and frets less about stains on the woodwork.

“I could help? I don’t mind helping. I mean, I’m happy to. Help you tidy. Or just tidy it myself if you’re going to bed,” skekGra yammers, watching urGoh’s progress up the ramp. How many trine has he spent living with the other skeksis, their screeching and shouting and squabbling, rudest and basest and loudest wins? He is unpractised in the art of speaking gently, kindly, not nit-picking. UrGoh is an urRu of few words even now that they have been together under this roof for some time. Maybe they all are; skekGra can guess it’s likely. UrGoh doesn’t ignore skekGra, but rarely starts a conversation, or perhaps he’s still in the middle of their first one, started more than a trine ago. “I don’t know how to talk to you,” he adds plainly with a deflated mien. 

UrGoh pauses mid-step and looks at him through the curtains of his hair. “More slowly,” he says, and this time skekGra’s laugh is abashed but on cue. 

*

Sometimes his fingers curl around air, clawing at nothing, shaking, rigid. His breath snatched from him, his muscles tense, tears stinging, jaw clenching. When he wakes like this in the night, it is easy to hide it. UrGoh sleeps up in his cushioned mezzanine, his low snores the lullaby skekGra lies awake to until the small hours. Pain is shared, but not fear or bad dreams. It is dark, and if urGoh ever thought something amiss the terror would have long since passed when he mustered himself and reached skekGra in his garden where he sleeps amongst the _urdrupe_ tendrils and fragrant leaves. But when it happens in the day it is harder to shield. When the images grip him, when the nightmares slink into his thoughts as the three brothers are rolling above them in the clear desert sky, skekGra becomes short-tempered, curt, shooing urGoh away even if he was nowhere close, striding off either onto the precipice outside the door to their home, or to the rear, where the hot air from the centre of their world flows upward, heating hidden pools and soothing skekGra’s panic a little. There, in front of him, are the stone steps lead downwards into the very heart of Thra. He has thought many times of descending them and leaving urGoh in peace. Better that than the leap from the edge into the desert. 

He will sit on the top step and wait it out. The ghosts of his past self, his deeds, his hands curved around the hilts of two swords and draped in blood, always leave him eventually. The feelings of horror, of shame, and of needing urGoh to never know how bad he got, enrobe him long after his vision clears and his temper calms.

When he enters their home again, urGoh doesn’t ask what he was doing, and skekGra doesn’t tell him.

*

“Is that me?”

UrGoh is stirring something for their supper in a pot over the firepit. Two of his hands are chopping a root vegetable that doesn’t grow in the desert and so must have been given to them by a Dousan caravan. SkekGra’s stomach shrivels slightly at the thought; the last sandskimmer to pass by was an _unum_ ago at least, and urGoh is the Wanderer, not the Cook.

SkekGra is also not the Gourmand, and so he leaves the stirring and root vegetables of dubious origin to urGoh. On the floor amongst the chisels and paintbrushes is a half-finished carving of a head, clearly skeksis, passably that of one Conqueror-cum-Heretic.

“Yes,” urGoh says, not looking at him. He scoops up the chopped vegetable and drops it into the pot with a splash. A third hand sprinkles some herbs into the mix, and he sniffs the result. 

“No nail,” skekGra says, pointing at the puppet head. 

“No,” urGoh agrees.

“I am the Conqueror then.”

UrGoh offers him a many shouldered shrug. “You are you.”

“I am also you,” skekGra says, and urGoh nods. A thought strikes skekGra, belated and laden with dread. “How much did it hurt you?” he asks, tilting his own head to better show urGoh the nail hammered into his skull as if urGoh is ignorant of its existence.

_Each strike fit to crack his skull, the Conqueror-no-more not knowing if what dripped down his face was blood, brains or tears._

_He’d never asked, and urGoh never told him. By the time they found one another again the blood had dried, been washed away, the blindness passing, the ache as constant as his certainty that it was a price worth paying._

“It was unbearable,” says urGoh, in a rare admittance to any of the suffering he as the other half of the Conqueror endured. Then, more dreadful still, he confirms one of skekGra’s fears since the mantle of Heretic was thrust upon him. “I have gotten used to the headache.”

SkekGra can’t think of anything to say. An apology is no good; all he did was what they both wanted, a fool’s errand, to convince the skeksis that unity was their destiny, but he feels responsible in part for their cruelty as one of them himself. 

“Is that why you smoke so much?” he offers after a pause in which the only noise is the muted clunking of wooden spoon against pot-edge.

The strange huffing noise urGoh makes is laughter, skekGra decides.

*

They eat stew under the stars on the edge of the world. Below them, the shifting sands of the Crystal Desert span as far as the eye can see, blanketing their part of Thra with mirages in an ever-changing landscape.

Behind them, through the triangular doorway into their stoney home, the firepit and lanterns cast a cosy glow against their backs. UrGoh is eating his stew from a bowl held in two hands. His other two are on his knees and his tail, heavy and long, swishes absently creating patterns on the sandy surface of the precipice. 

SkekGra takes the opportunity, eating from his own bowl, to look at him. UrGoh is mostly in shadow, that great deluge of hair spilling over both sets of shoulders, along his neck and sticking out from beneath his headpiece. Bent-backed and half-lidded, urGoh hums to himself as he sets down his stew.

“Not bad,” he says into the night.

“Not your worst, no.”

UrGoh gazes directly at him; the light from the fire catches amongst the whorls on the skin of his nose and a breeze, cool and gentle, begins a dance with the hair that falls either side of his face. His expression is not unkind.

SkekGra puts down his own bowl and reaches toward urGoh. His hair is thick and doesn’t tangle, flowing through skekGra’s fingers like water.

“I used to be… able to do this…” skekGra murmurs, thinking back to darker days where he would wind his own ropes. What he used them for he chooses not to remember, lest the spell break and urGoh pull away from those hands he now turns to more pleasant arts. 

It comes back to him, nevertheless, and he splits a lock of urGoh’s hair into three strands. Right one over middle, left one over middle, down and down and down. Then a second lock, four strands this time, the braid thicker and only a little muddled in the middle where he dropped a strand and confused himself. UrGoh is a model patient, sitting very still and closing his eyes. The tip of his tail brushes against skekGra’s feet now and then, a _tsk-tsk_ if he pulls too hard, or an encouragement when his hands pause at the end of the plait, unsure if he should reach for another.

The feeling in skekGra’s belly is probably no more than the stew, warm and satisfying.

* 

He had _hated_ the thought of his other half. Loathed that he couldn’t get rid of the idea of him, the curse of that other side of him such that he was destined to live with urGoh lingering like a ghost at the back of his mind. The other skeksis must have felt the same, but so embroiled in their own wants and needs and tastes and mischief-turned-wickedness they would never admit it. The Emperor would have had their head, thereby solving the problem either way.

SkekSo was obsessed with death. SkekGra revelled in it. 

The Arathim. Unruly gelfling clans. The Gruenaks; how many of their children did he orphan for mere moments before sending them too tumbling into oblivion? 

It possesses him, the guilt and the unlooked-for joy that now flash through his mind just as thoughts of urGoh once did. These feelings have have changed places, and while it rattles him still to have memories of his sins as the Conqueror flood his being without warning the very sight of urGoh is enough to quell them in most cases, his presence the scratching of a lifelong itch, the satisfying of a hunger, the quenching at last of an unquenchable thirst.

*

“Is that me?” urGoh asks, and skekGra almost throws the puppet the height of him in fright. UrGoh, for his slow pace, could be as quiet as the dead.

The urRu sits down beside him and peers over his arm, hair almost covering the thing he’s looking at. SkekGra feels suddenly hot-cheeked. He’d wanted it to be a surprise, making the counterpart to urGoh’s model of him, but his hands are not so skilled, and it does not look much like anyone yet. UrGoh is being polite.

“Yes,” he says, flustered anyway, “but just a prototype! Mine will be just as good as yours once it is finished!”

“I look forward to seeing it,” urGoh says, and his eyes crease in a smile at the compliment. SkekGra feels his face heat more than ever. 

“Well, don’t spoil it! Away!” he says, and urGoh dutifully shuffles off, staff tapping on the floor, toward the rear of their home. 

“I am going,” he says over his shoulders, “to take a bath.”

“Fine,” skekGra says, frowning at the selection of urGoh’s tools he has laid out in front of him. 

“Join me if you wish.”

It takes a good moment for urGoh’s words to fully pass through skekGra’s head, and he almost drops his selected chisel once the meaning blooms. His head snaps up, but all he can see is the end of urGoh’s tail disappearing through the doorway at the rear of their home, down toward the pools heated by the Breath of Thra.

He can move fast enough when he wants to, skekGra thinks, and dithers so much that by the time he has decided that he is dusty enough that a bath _could_ be in order urGoh is already disrobed and watching him from the water, his eyes and the tip of his nose above the surface like some lake-dwelling snapping reptile, his hair swirling around him like seaweed.

There are numerous pools, some only large enough to soak one’s feet in, but the one urGoh has chosen is the one they both prefer, though normally by themselves. It is not too deep, and has a rocky ledge around one side for sitting on. The temperature is just cool enough not to scald, and hot enough to slough off dirt and detritus without much vigorous scrubbing. 

UrGoh holds out on arm to skekGra as he clambers in, sparing his blushes by pretending to unravel a non-existent knot in his hair with another hand as he negotiates the edge of the bath. It’s a tricky one to get into and out of, and skekGra silently envies urGoh the use of all four of his arms for the task, and even more silently thanks him for his sudden predilection for activities at the other side of their home whenever skekGra is performing his ablutions; far enough away not to hear, or to plausibly deny hearing, his paroxysmal thrashing clambering in and out. SkekGra sees, as he slips into the water and his eyes adjust to the dimness, that urGoh is standing on the bottom in a rare display of his true height. His posture is still abysmal, urRu anatomy dictating the angle of his back and the bend of his knees even when buoyed by the water, but they are almost eye to eye when urGoh straightens what parts of himself that he can out, and skekGra finds this appealing. They are not so dissimilar in form really, under clothing and hair and averted glances just as bony and peculiarly-limbed as each other. He lets go of urGoh’s hand, having been clutching at it long after his own feet touched the uneven floor of the pool, and drifts gently to the rock-seat, on which he perches himself, watching urGoh. 

It’s hard to really see in the poor light and the shifting water, and urGoh’s hair floating in a ever-shifting halo all around him, but his feet are both flat on the bottom and his arms are drifting in the water with open hands, moving lazily back and forth through the warmth. 

“Is it nice?” asks skekGra. 

“Very,” says urGoh, face almost under the water, eyes crossed in relaxation. Perhaps it gives relief from the throbbing in his head, skekGra thinks, or even just the simple novelty of being upright. He is slender and strange and skekGra feels the urge to float within the orbit of his arms.

“Can you swim?” urGoh asks, pulling skekGra from a reverie he is slipping into more easily than the water. 

“No,” he says, “well, not very well. I’ve never had to.” _Four arms closing around him, holding him above the surface, safe and slow._

“A shame,” says urGoh, “there is a bigger pool deeper down.”

SkekGra smiles at the thought of urGoh getting in his daily lengths. “How often do you visit it?”

“Oh,” urGoh says, “every so often.” And before skekGra can probe further into this mysterious habit of his companion, urGoh dips beneath the surface, pushing off from the far wall of the pool and reappearing by skekGra’s elbow in an elegant, underwater C-curve, with only a very little tidal wave _plish_ ing against skekGra’s chest upon his re-emergence. The pool, too small for swimming, is nevertheless roughly the length of one Mystic from nose to tail, and the sight of urGoh’s brief dive is a far cry from his usual shambling, interminable plodding on solid ground. SkekGra opens his mouth to say as much but is struck momentarily dumb by the sight of urGoh post-dunk, nothing more than his sloping nose poking from a dripping curtain of hair, and he laughs loudly, and gets pushed underwater for his impetuousness.

*

He doesn’t tell urGoh about it, the images that flit before his eyes, sparked by the gentle shove below the lapping surface of the pool. The Gruenak childlings in a river running red, running over his eyes and nose, their lives sizzling out like the wick of a candle between his thumb-and-fingertip. Or the _punishment_ , before the hammering. Head held under, bubbles sliding from his nostrils like a great many slugs, his howling a strangled burbling, the exultation of the skeksis lords around and above him little more than distorted banshee cries muffled and distant as he thrashed fruitlessly against their unbreakable grasp.

_He’s out and dripping and panting and blind and all he can think about is what they’ll do to urGoh._

UrGoh is dressed and drying his hair by the firepit when skekGra finally emerges, robes thrown over himself and clinging to his limbs where damp, trying and failing to school his eyes into something less panicked. The urRu lifts a hand to him as he surges past, catching the edge of his sleeve and catching skekGra unawares, whirling, staring at him as if never having seen urGoh before in his life. Looking in a mirror and seeing someone else.

“Would you re-braid my hair for me?” UrGoh asks, either not noticing, or pretending not to notice skekGra’s manic state. He must know, he has to sense the terror coursing through skekGra like a flock of crystal bats. He knows, he’s offering distraction; a mundane, repetitive activity, an intimacy that skekGra hears himself rejecting and hates himself for it, but he’s too far gone, slapping urGoh’s hand away, snarling and hurling himself out of the door and sitting on the edge of their world dripping and shaking, the stars above him blinking, the calls of faraway sandskimmers on the wind wistful and yearning like lost souls in the growing dusk.

*

“Tell me.”

“I can’t.” SkekGra’s voice sounds strange to his ears, small and afraid. So far a cry from the Conqueror that it may as well have been some other creature’s memories he somehow has lodged within him, some other life he led: first urskek, then skeksis, then this? What is he now?

What are _they_?

UrGoh’s hands are warm and dry and touch him softly, curving around his own balled fists, two more lifted to skekGra’s head, framing his face. A tear spills from skekGra’s eye and runs between two of urGoh’s fingers. Neither of them wipes it away. 

“Come inside then. Sit with me.” UrGoh doesn’t try to pull skekGra up, or tug or nudge him. He just gazes at him, stroking his jaw, hands over hands over hands until skekGra feels the clenching softening, the ache in his knuckles relenting. “I would like your company. It’s too cold out here for me,” he adds, looking out toward the desert beyond. It isn’t really, but urGoh is still mostly a dripping tumult of hair and skekGra feels confident enough in his legs’ ability to carry him back into the heat and light enough to nod and allow urGoh to lead him back through their doorway, one step at a time. 

Beyond the glimmer of the fire skekGra can see the puppets and tools still lying on the floor, not abandoned, but waiting. 

UrGoh is very good, skekGra has come to acknowledge, at doing two things at once. When skekGra is in a temper for one reason or another, urGoh is quietly painting, giving him space during which skekGra usually calms and comes to find out what he’s up to, curiosity winning out over conniptions. Or when he tosses and turns in the night and urGoh is still out smoking beneath the sky, singing his low notes and lulling him into dreams more soothing, his voice carried with him into slumber like a talisman against the spectres of his past. Or now, as skekGra sits staring into the embers of the firepit, shivering and scowling at himself and trying himself in knots, urGoh is beside him and occupied with stoking the flames, nudging the firewood with a well-worn fingertip, fanning the flames with another hand, and giving skekGra time to come out with it.

All of these have one thing in common, and skekGra winces, and opens his mouth to apologise and fails, immediately. 

The water, he begins, reminds him of being half-drowned by the skeksis lords before they drove the nail into head, and before that, drowning Gruenaks himself so deep in the Black river that he went under too. Or the splashing of blood, and worse, on his face, and seeking it over and over, the heat of gore and the cries of the doomed beneath the feet of his armies, their bodies opening up under the edge of his blade. Head thrown back and jaws wide in a howl of ecstasy against the reddening sky. Victory was more rejuvenating than the light from the Crystal, matched in intensity only by the shame he feels now.

“Master urSu discovered a way to steal glimpses through our dark halves’ eyes,” urGoh says, and skekGra jerks his head up and doesn’t dare chide him for interrupting. urGoh almost never talks about the other Mystics, let alone reveals such potent nuggets of information. “Meditation, deep and long, and the right frame of mind. Perhaps some herb or other, or a rune scratched just so in the sand between our feet. The others all claimed their method worked best, but I do not think they ever really succeeded. If they had,” he adds, “they would not so soon try again.”

It is a cold finger of dread that runs itself down skekGra’s spine. “What did you see?”

UrGoh goes on. “The only other Mystic I know of who achieved his second sight was the Archer. Our paths crossed now and again, and we would sing together, or share a meal or a story of our travels. He told me he had seen himself as skekMal, and I was too eager to share in how he attained this to be wary of the shadow in his eyes. I fear urVa’s expedition into the mind of the Hunter was much the same as my experience. He never would tell me what he saw, but he was more solemn for it.” UrGoh looks solemn enough at the memory.

The dampness running down skekGra’s face is not blood this time. “What did you see?” he asks again, voice cracking no louder than the flickering of the fire.

“UrVa warned me against trying, told me that I would be changed by the things I would see. He was right. Pain and death; I endured your memories, I suffered the things you did unto others.”

“I regret now so much time spent rejoicing in the glory of conquest,” skekGra says quietly, “the waste of so many trine I could have spent with you.” 

“It was your nature,” urGoh says, “so I could not fault you for it, but I looked more than once. I found that I could not help it. When a new wound opened in my flesh I would search with your eyes to find its source, and I was never satisfied. Perhaps I hoped that you might sense me, perhaps I thought I could control and guide your hand away from your sword, but I could not change you. Pain and death and pain, and the exultation of it, seeking, always seeking. And yet I could not look away. I understood at last urVa’s warning. It seems,” he looks down, “that despite our unfathomable differences, despite the fact you would have likely struck me down had I stumbled into your path without considering it would also be your end, I loved you even then.”

SkekGra is staring at him, urGoh’s words dancing through his head, where they have always been and understood only now for what they mean.

UrGoh pulls up a sleeve, exposing a dark and slender wrist and forearm marred with several old and silvered scars; a claw mark, perhaps, from some brave and hopeless creature long since returned to Thra. 

“These I have weathered, and the scars you carry here,” urGoh taps his head, “you will too endure, with me.” A third hand falls on skekGra’s arm where the same old injury is etched into his skin beneath his robes. “Do not be afraid of me, I am only you.”

The end of possibly the longest thing urGoh has ever said to skekGra leaves him almost without words. Somehow, he finds them again amongst the shattered glass of his thoughts.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“There was never a good time,” urGoh says. “our conversations were either too brief, or too shallow.”

“But I am you.”

UrGoh nods. “And _you_ did not tell me the things you kept within, coring you like an apple.”

“It seems I didn’t have to; you were watching all along.” He looks at the fire, eyes blinking, breath on the edge between inhale and sob. “I wish I had thought more highly of you. Perhaps I would have… seen sense sooner had I looked through your eyes in turn.”

“I think not,” urGoh says, and skekGra silently agrees. They both know it would have done no good, the thrill of victory, the very needing and wanting and having that drive all skeksis closer to the brink was stitched so tightly within all of them that skekGra least of all would ever have torn himself away had Thra not chosen them.

“I thought of you as my weakness. That- that to even _think_ of you was weakening, to ever consider that I was half of something greater, that I was not already great. The vision,” skekGra says, “terrified me. How could one being be more luminous than I already was? I had forgotten,” he says, his fingers tracing the scars on urGoh’s arm, “who GraGoh had been.”

UrGoh’s other arms have been moving as skekGra speaks, placing down his staff and creating a sanctuary into which skekGra moves, hands and knees, fingers clasping and roving and carding into urGoh’s hair over and over, his nose slipping beneath urGoh’s chin, rubbing his head against his, cheek to cheek and eye to eye. UrGoh’s arms are wrapping around him, his long neck curving over his shoulder and the warmth from his body bleeds into skekGra’s, more substantial and affirming than the fire, a safe harbour from which skekGra wants never to be torn. 

SkekGra extricates himself just enough to look urGoh in the face, and the question he wants to ask flutters and dies on his tongue. UrGoh: backlit by firelight, his hair a golden faerie-corona around his head, his eyes heavy-lidded, all soft lines and spectral glow. 

“If you could look through my eyes now,” skekGra says quietly, “and see what I see.”

“There is no need,” urGoh says, “now that I can see you.” His touch is tender, the tips of two fingers against skekGra’s jaw, the susurration of his tail across the sandy floor, the longing in his expression.

No, skekGra thinks, not longing. Completion.

He feels it too.

*

When skekGra lifts his head in the morning the three brothers are only just clearing the horizon outside, their light filtering into the Circle of the Suns in slices through the stones, moving slowly across the walls and floor as the morning progresses. The air is still cool. 

From where he lies he can still see the puppets and the paints on the floor; it is a mess, really, despite urGoh’s best intentions. An idea strikes him soft as a chime, but before he can do much about anything urGoh wakes up and stretches behind him, arms and legs and tail at length and then folding inward again with skekGra in the middle. He makes a sleep-laden and satisfied sort of noise, nosing into the downy hair of skekGra’s neck and resting his chin there, so skekGra is pinned in a most unobjectionable way, cocooned in urRu. He stills and closes his eyes again, content to drift.

Above them leaves of green and gold wave softly on their vines. Around them a mire of blankets and a few articles of clothing. The desert is a cold place at night, even on a world with three suns. Drying tears and leading hands and fading light. Embers and sparks. 

UrGoh was no less beautiful with hair spread around him on pillows, lissom without the dragging drapery of his sleeves and hems and sluggish gait. SkekGra had averted his gaze in the pool but not in the night. 

“I’ve been thinking,” skekGra says some time later, eyes still closed and still wrapped in Mystic. The pause he leaves is so long urGoh lifts his head to check whether he is talking in his sleep. He jerks back when skekGra’s eye snaps open and pushes himself back with two arms as his other half scrambles to his feet and bounds out of the garden, tail whipping through the _urdrupe_ tendrils leaving them flying in his wake.

“Here!” skekGra says, having hopped over the puppetry materials in his path and now holding out his hands and measuring something imaginary against the far wall.

“ _Here_ ,” urGoh says, rummaging in the pile and holding out some piece of skekGra’s discarded attire, receiving only a flustered shake of the head.

“Forget about that! We need to build you a workbench.” 

“You need to get dressed,” urGoh says, lying on his front with his head propped up on two hands. He makes no further effort to reunite skekGra with the garment other than to absently keep a grasp of it with a third hand.

“Do I?” skekGra says, “we live alone in a desert.”

“And when the caravan comes with which we will trade for the materials to make your workbench-“

“- _your_ workbench. Clothes then, if you _insist_.”

By the time urGoh is dressed and skekGra more or less so, the suns are arcing toward their zenith. UrGoh sits within the canopy of the garden, leaves in his hair, blowing smoke rings and content to let skekGra whirl and pace and mutter and spring from one end of the room to the other when the solution to whatever problem he’s currently working out presents itself. 

It’s like the vision all over again, a sense of renewal, being himself again. His new self, skekGra asserts, emboldened against the regrets of the past by a few short hours in the arms of the Wanderer who now wanders only in his mind and is willing to share the journey. Should the past return and the nightmares creep into his peripheral even in the day, the remedy is now never far. Heresy has its perks.

*

“Finished,” skekGra calls up to him. UrGoh’s head appears between the hanging gauzes and over the railing of his nook, peering down at him from within a wreath of smoke.

“Bring them up.”

When he reaches the top of the ramp urGoh has put away his pipe, and is sitting expectantly, legs crossed, two hands on his knees and a third arm resting along the railing. The fourth hand he busies unknotting a rare tangle in his hair, but his attention is on skekGra and what he’s holding out to him.

“Look,” skekGra says. His eagerness simmers beneath the surface, but he keeps calm as urGoh cranes his long neck toward him and examines what in each of his main hands. 

It’s them, inches tall, perfectly formed out of wood, stone, cloth, thread. Painted faces, bright eyes and no nail in the head.

UrGoh takes the puppet-Wanderer and holds him to the light. It is a rather good likeness.

“What did you use for my hair?” he asks, rubbing the strands of it between thumb and forefinger.

“ _Your_ hair,” skekGra says without hesitation. “I’m always finding tufts of it caught on everything, I really wish you’d-“

“This is wonderful,” urGoh says. His eyes close in a smile.

SkekGra diverts from his complaining seamlessly. “They work too, watch.” He takes the Wanderer puppet back and with a little finagling, a twitch of his wrist, a gesture, makes him walk along his forearm, shake his head, lift a tiny arm up as if stretching for something just out of reach. The real urGoh’s tail thumps softly against the cushions; he lifts the Heretic puppet from skekGra’s other hand and has him meet his companion in the crook of skekGra’s elbow. 

“Wonderful,” he says again, voice just an absent whisper, as they watch themselves embrace in miniature.

“Almost as good as the real thing,” skekGra says. 

_Their embrace in the night just as long. Soothing and seeking and slowly shuddering into something more._

“A purpose,” urGoh says, “within a purpose.”

 _The soft shock of urGoh’s hands against his skin. His touch sliding from absent to deliberate to reverential._

“I don’t understand,” says skekGra. UrGoh takes both puppets from him, holds him in two of his hands and pats the cushion beside him with a third. SkekGra sits beside him, watching the puppets as urGoh turns them over in his hands.

“We seek unity,” urGoh says, “but that may yet be many trine in coming. Until then, we will find purpose in the purpose. Each step,” he gestures down to the workbench, the puppets, the garden, the hidden pools out of sight, “taking us ever closer.” 

_Rapture._

“Can I?” skekGra says, reaching tentatively for urGoh’s hair. UrGoh gives him a great nod of his head, then points his nose toward him, peering along it at him through sleepy eyes, the fondness they convey making skekGra’s hands fumble as he splits a lock and begins to braid. UrGoh hums as he works, long and low and skekGra has to start again, fingers in knots and not paying attention. 

“I’m not very good at the four-strand ones yet,” skekGra mumbles, and urGoh breaks off his song for a moment to set the puppets on the floor at their feet and hold out a hand. SkekGra places the fourth strand of hair in his palm, and urGoh holds it, releases, holds and releases as skekGra works his way down to the end. UrGoh starts his song again and it weaves in and out of the plaits in his hair, around and between the one-now-two-now-what? of them, unwavering even as skekGra recruits a second of urGoh’s hands to tackle a fifth strand, urging it into usefulness with impatient taps on his elbow. The result is messy, and unravels almost as quickly as skekGra braids it but it is no matter, and goes unnoticed as skekGra suddenly makes his babbled apologies in the space between urGoh’s jaw and throat, burying his face in his hair, getting it in his eyes and mouth and dampening it with tears. Sorry for always snapping, sorry for pushing you away, sorry for all the things I did, the things you saw, the things I made you suffer through. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, _I love you_.

UrGoh’s hands forget braiding and instead tangle themselves with skekGra’s and it really isn’t so difficult any more to think that unity lies somewhere in their future, closer with every shared breath, every shudder, every synchronised heartbeat. UrGoh doesn’t need to say it; skekGra knows he is forgiven and always was; in the fingers that dance across his cheek, in the way urGoh excavates him from his burrow and rubs the side of his nose against skekGra’s, eyelids drifting shut. 

It feels natural, now. To lean into him again, to move his head against and beneath urGoh’s as two more arms drape themselves around him, hands making little nests in folds of robes or the angle between hip and thigh. He finds refuge again in the curtain of urGoh’s hair, winding his fingers into it, inhaling its smoky sweet scent. 

UrGoh’s song is low, and builds, a note that vibrates through them, seeking and finding and binding them closer with each twist and turn, as unceasing as the sky that turns from day to night above them and as solid Thra itself below.

**Author's Note:**

> I dunno I just kinda think skekGra was less of a maniacal fusspot before his many trine hanging with his me-with-benefits roommate urGoh???


End file.
